Willie Brown may be best known in blues lore as a sidekick to the legends of Delta blues — Charley Patton, Son House, and Robert Johnson — but he was regarded as a top-notch guitarist, and could have achieved more fame had he been offered more opportunities to record on his own. “Future Blues,” one of the handful of sides he made as a singer, was recorded at Paramount’s Grafton, Wisconsin studio in the summer of 1930, when Brown traveled to Grafton with Patton and House and accompanied them on a few songs as well. An exemplary Delta blues with some now-familiar verses, “Future Blues” might be called Pattonesque in its rhythm and rough vocal timbre. And just as Patton reworked blues from Ma Rainey and other singers, so did Brown: “Future Blues” opens with verses from Rainey’s “Last Minute Blues,” composed by Thomas A. Dorsey. While not a big seller, the record (originally Paramount 13090) had an extended life when it was re-released on the Champion label, and Paramount also slotted it on its Broadway subsidiary under the pseudonym Billy Harper.
